When the New York Times received a leak that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on conversations between al-Qaida and its U.S. operatives, the New York Times new it had a story with Pulitzer Prize written all over it. A year after the intercept program was launched, the Times printed a story on the secret program on it front page. According to the Times:
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior [Bush] administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting.
In a speech before the National Press Club, then Vice President Dick Cheney said:
Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the terrorist surveillance program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaida and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of every single individual killed by al-Qaida on 9/11. Now, here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaida. It impressed the Pulitzer Committee but it damned sure didn’t serve the interests of this country or the safety of our people.
When it came to "getting the story," the lives of average Americans was not worth suppressing a story to the editors at the New York Times. However, when it comes to lives of their reporters, survival is a priority.
Seven months ago, Taliban terrorists kidnapped Times reporter David Rohde, his driver and a local reporter. The Times believed that keeping the story off its front page could save the life of their reporter. According to the Times’ executive editor Bill Keller:
From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.
Luckily, David Rohde and the other reporter escaped by climbing a wall of the compound where they were imprisoned and hiked to a Pakistani military camp. The reporters were later airlifted to a U.S. military base in Bagram, Afghanistan. It’s interesting that the Times was quite willing to suppress a story that endangered one of their reporters but showed no such restraint when printing stories tipping off al-Qaida to our government’s telephone intercept program – an act that clearly endangered all our lives.
Oh, I almost forgot; the driver, who was kidnapped along with the reporters by Taliban terrorists, was left behind. No matter, he is not nearly as important as a reporter.
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